Backing Tracks. that’s cheating… right?
Let’s get a discussion going around what seems to be a controversial subject amongst musicians, and certainly amongst covers bands like Side Hustle: Backing tracks. Should you use them? Why don’t you just add another band member? Aren’t you cheating? You might as well put the record on and mime!
What are backing tracks? It seems obvious, but to the un-initiated or someone who is just starting to delve deeper into the art of performance, backing tracks are pre-recorded audio files that a band can play along to in order to pad out their sound, add extra instruments, vocals or sound effects, and add extra elements to the sound that the audience hears and (hopefully) enjoys! They can be played through many devices, but more often than not they are run from a laptop using software such as Ableton Live or Mainstage (we use Larry’s Roland SPD-SX Pro sample pad) and the sound is mixed and balanced with the output from the musicians playing live on stage. The musicians will often have a click track playing alongside these tracks that only they can hear, which allows them to sync their performance to the track, and hey presto, a great sound is projected to the front of house speakers.
What does this mean for the performance? When it all works as it’s supposed to (sometimes running tracks does present some technical issues!) then my personal view is that the performance is enhanced, especially as the band get more used to working with the track, and knowing when and where they can perhaps play in front of, on or slightly behind the beat to add a different character or feel to the groove of the music. Hell, you can even programme your tracks to incorporate a ‘human’ element to the time keeping so it’s not like playing to a metronome!
Aren’t you cheating by using a backing track? Why don’t you learn to play the parts yourselves?! This is where backing tracks become marmite. The internet is awash with forums that bemoan bands that use tracks, and who don’t learn to play certain parts or incorporate musicians in their line up who can. They are seen as being lesser musicians for playing to tracks and that therefore their contribution to the live music scene should be discounted.
Well… I can fully understand this point of view! I love hearing bands that rehearse for countless hours to be able to craft a song to perfection with all the parts performed live. In fact this is what we do for the majority of the songs we learn and perform live. However… so many contemporary artists are now producing music that has so many elements and moving parts that it requires so many musicians to be on stage to even get close to the sound produced on the studio album. Let’s take a look at one such artist: Taylor Swift (I can see Scott’s eye’s rolling at the mere mention of her name. He’s NOT a fan!).
Her current Eras tour sees her travelling with a 6 piece band and 4 backing vocalists. The band are all multi-instrumentalists (not sure about the drummer, but his set up might be the theme of a later blog…. watch this space). Why does she need so many musicians playing so many instruments and so many backing singers? Well numerous Swift tracks have multiple layers of synths which add texture and richness to underpin the traditional guitar and bass sounds. Sometimes there are just synths! The vocal parts she writes also use loads of multipart harmonies again to add body and character to the songs. This is fine for an artist playing in huge stadiums and it is admirable that the Eras tour uses so many live musicians to recreate the sounds of the album pretty faithfully. However, for your average every day down to earth 5 piece party rock covers band like Side Hustle et al, it is just an impossible ask to add one or maybe two more musicians to our line up. We are often limited for stage space, very limited for rehearsal space and very very limited in terms of the budget we can bring to bear in order to try and replicate the sounds that some bands produce and that you all know and love. That’s where the backing track comes in!
Where do you get them from? There are commercially available backing tracks on websites various, some good quality, others are well… meh. We have used these in the past, but now we tend to produce our own using a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) called Logic Pro. This allows us to create backing tracks using software instruments of preset sounds, and also allows us to use virtual synths to create or replicate our own sounds if there are no stock sounds available which suit what we are trying to achieve. It really is an incredible piece of software and is used all across the music industry to record and produce music (see here for a great breakdown of how Jacob Collier uses it https://grahamstoney.com/music/how-a-real-musician-uses-the-logic-pro-digital-audio-workstation). We then add a click track, and upload the final version to Larry’s sample pad. He then does some magic which means that when he hits the machine, the track and click start together in sync, and we play our parts over the top. If you come and see us live, you’ll notice that we use backing tracks in songs with lots of synth sounds or complicated backing vocals which lie outside of the Tim, Scott, JD and Larry’s vocal range. Van Halen Jump and Pulp Common People are two examples of songs where we use tracks. (Head over to our VIDEOS section and check out Mr Brightside. We use a backing track for the synth parts. Let us know what you think below!).
Answer the question! IS IT CHEATING?! OK OK! No. You won’t be surprised to learn that we don’t think it is. For us, the remit of a good covers band is to try and replicate the sound of your favourite artists however they choose to do so. For some it will be acceptance of the fact that they don’t have a keyboard player and perhaps get their guitarist to play the keyboard solo line using a patch or pedal effect. For some it will be recruit as many musicians as possible to try and reproduce an accurate sound as faithfully possible with as many parts being played live as possible. For us, it is to do all of the above where we think it works, and if there is too much going on for the five of us to play, then that’s where the backing track comes in. We produce them ourselves, so they are crafted by a human, one of us, they aren’t AI generated or downloaded from another source. So what you’re hearing is in fact one of us playing a synth or a percussion part etc, which is recorded and played back to you as part of our overall sound. At the end of the day, as long as our audience (or the majority of them!) enjoy the sound we’re creating, then that’s fine by us!
I’ll caveat the above that it’s just opinion, and I fully accept that you all may have your own on the subject. Or you may not! If you do and you want to share, why not leave a comment?
As always we appreciate your support and are really grateful for you coming out to hear us play. Thanks for looking in, and hopefully see you soon!
Side Hustle.